Something Twitter's Good For

And other approaches to vocational overwhelm

The logistics of scheduling this week’s research interview went off flawlessly. After a positive response to a DM on Twitter, after an Outlook invite was sent and accepted, Kaleb Nyquist agreed to meet on Teams to videochat early-career overwhelm.

You would think that, after all that exercise of digital prowess, the interview, too, would have gone off glitchlessly. Kaleb’s and my systems could not be more tightly synced, right? But as is so often the case in the uncanniness of digital exchange, we tripped on a gap between expectations and actualities.

After some demographic preliminaries and some narrative background, Kaleb received my next set of questions with a pause. When he finally spoke, he noted gently that my questions were going in a direction he hadn’t anticipated.

Yikes. As a rule, I do qualitative research, because I love surprise—but not this kind! I try to make sure my interviewees know what the research is about. I use a carefully crafted consent form. I make sure they know the expected publication outcomes of the research. I discuss the risks. I ask permission to record. By the time we get down to asking questions, I don’t generally want to hear, Hey, I thought you were going to ask about this not about that.

Here’s what Kaleb was expecting from the interview:

I thought we were going to have a conversation about e-mail, and all the texts that come in and how we deal with that in our professional life. And I was like, ‘Oh, I'm so ready to talk about this. I have so many tips and tricks for dealing with e-mail and, you know, moving stuff from an e-mail to an inbox and automating and all this...’

Most of my research participants could understand what Kaleb’s wryly referencing here. Vocational overwhelm often presents as communicational problem: too many IMs, too many notifications, too many screens, too many Zoom meetings. But the mismatch between Kaleb’s expectations and my questions said something fresh to say about the communicational dimensions of vocational overwhelm.

Let me thumbnail the insight this way: we’re right to see overwhelm as a communicational problem, but we’re not quite so right to see communication as an informational management problem. In other words, when we think of communication, we think of an exchange of information between a sender and a receiver. On that reading, coping with overwhelm means balancing all the sendings with all the receivings. If you’re sending too much, you’re overwhelming others. If you’re receiving too much, you are yourself overwhelmed. That’s commonsense.

Or, at least it’s the commonsense of the cybernetic mode, an approach to communication focused on channeling the influx of data across a network. As many attention theorists are pointing out, digital overload is an enormous problem area for workplace life today. And it’s a cybernetic predicament with personal consequences.

As Cal Newport has made clear in books like Deep Work and A World without Email, digital communication and its accompanying logistical demands really do eat up a lot of cognition, disabling us for the sustained problem-solving that complex knowledge work requires. Newport calls this communication overload, and he’s not wrong to want to diminish it.

But notice that the metaphor of overload construes miscommunication as primarily a capacity problem. It all comes down to processing speeds, see? Just make sure that incoming data do not exceed the capacity of the CPU or the cognition.

I think our everyday practice suggests that communication is more than cybernetic—which is why I ask questions, not just about a system’s load capacity, but about a person’s conversations, about sending and receiving and silence.

Kaleb helped me to realize all this when he, somewhat self-disparagingly, described his usual approach to overwhelm: “I must must find a new app to deal with my e-mail! Or, I must find a new way of organizing the folders that I keep stuff in on my computer!” Fortunately, the longer he thought about it, the more he found himself referencing other, fresher ways of coping. Here are two.

Slow, patient, discerning conversation. This newsletter has addressed aligning our professional and personal identities, drawing upon the distinction made by symbolic interactionists between the “I” and the “me.” The former is your authentic self; the latter is the self that melds to others’ expectations. The maxim I suggested was not to let work poke your “I” out.

The gap between who you are in your work and who you are at your core has been, at times, an overwhelming question for Kaleb. As a public-facing communicator—an environmental activist and an organizational spokesperson—he has found it easy simply be the position he’s paid to represent. That’s not a problem he can fix with an app. Instead, Kaleb finds help in the dialogic mode of communication, an approach to life and work framed by intimate conversation. He takes shelter in small-group exchanges, which help him resist the temptation to submerge his authentic self into his onstage persona.

Innovative, quirky, integrative broadcasting. Kaleb has also found solace in scattering messages into the world for whoever has the patience to weigh and consider. For him, this use of the disseminative mode happens most often on Twitter. Perhaps that doesn’t sound promising to you—and Kaleb is quick to concede that the Twitterverse can be toxic. But it can also allow a complex vocation to breathe.

I don't have that one job, that one title that encompasses every part of my professional identity. I have a lot of projects and volunteer roles and yadda yadda yadda. Twitter becomes a place where I can almost make up that professional identity, where I say things that synthesize to different thoughts from different parts of my professional world…. In the same stream I can jump from saying something about how people communicate and interpret and understand each other to a really wonky data thing…

Tweeting might not strike you as a practice of vocational discernment. But think of it this way: dissemination honors and engages the unavoidable gaps between speakers and hearers. As Jesus put it, let those with ears to hear—hear. One implication of that line is the need to allow for people’s varying levels of readiness to receive a message. Or as Kaleb says of his Twitter readers, “They don’t have to follow me, right?” 

But notice, too, that the disseminative mode also frees speakers and audiences to connect in unexpected ways. Here’s Kaleb again:

You know…some of my favorite meetups have been with people that I met on Twitter… There's a guy who's been kind of a mentor for me here in D.C.… We only started hanging out because I followed him on Twitter and he realized that we have four points of common interest. We didn't know another person with the same four points of common interest, right?

When early-career professionals don’t have to respond to the demands of an immediate audience or advocate for one institutional perspective, they can try out new ways of being themselves and new ways of relating with unlooked-for others.  

So, there you have this week’s recommended mode switch. Two of them, actually. I mention the disseminative and the dialogic, because they deal with vocational overwhelm without the usual digital hacks. Instead, these ways of coping arise from modes of communication that invite fresh connection and new creation.

Who I’m Learning From

Feeling a little cringy that all three of my recommendations this week are white guys. I deserve more than a quantum of your contempt. But maybe hear out my recommendations anyway.

An episode this week on The Ezra Klein Show featured a conversation with Jenny Schuetz, “Why Housing Is So Expensive—Particularly in Blue States.” Readers of this newsletter will note the pod’s attention to early-career professionals, particularly when it comes to knowledge workers needing to move to big cities to learn an industry—so they can then go to smaller cities and start their own businesses in those fields. It turns out that where young professionals lay their heads matters to the GDP.

I’ve been re-reading Percy’s The Last Gentleman with my friend Mark Jones and have been struck by how much of the communication breakdowns in the novel—which is, by the way, much funnier than I remembered it being—have nothing to do with cybernetic disconnects and everything to do with hilarious slippages in affable conversations.

And, finally, I’d like to recommend that if you tweet, try Kaleb. What I like best about his work is that his tweets take you deeper than headlines and make weird connections across fields. He also practices rhetorical restraint, a much-needed virtue in these urgent times.